I came into the Ph.D. with the idea that I would end up teaching at a school like my undergrad, Drake University. I didn’t think R1 life was for me, too much stress given the “publish or perish” lifestyle. Over time, I started to really love my research and I decided I wanted a mixture of teaching and research. While you do get to do some teaching at R1s, it’s usually not your main focus. I wanted something closer to a 50/50 split. I wasn’t sure these universities existed until my lab mate came back from a panel about being in academia and one of the panelist brought up “Primarily Undergrad Universities”, or PUIs. These are universities that have no or very few graduate students, but they still want their professors to get good research done. This sounded like exactly where I wanted to be, and there is a website that aggregates all of the CS job postings for these schools. With this list in hand, the search became a lot easier.

Preparing My Materials

Once schools started putting up job listings in the summer, I began looking at the materials they wanted in my application package. Every schools wanted my CV, a research statement , a teaching statement, 2-3 letters of recommendation, my academic transcript, and a cover letter. Several wanted a diversity statement. Those that didn’t asked me to speak to diversity in my research and teaching statements. This seems to be pretty standard across both R1s and PUIs. I’m guessing teaching schools also have a research statement, but it likely isn’t emphasized. One notable difference between R1 and PUIs is that 1 of the letters of recommendation needed to come from someone who could speak to my teaching ability.

Research Statement

The research statement was a bit of a challenge. You want to show that your research matters, but you also need to make it approachable to a general audience. If your research is very specific and niche to your field, this can sometimes be a bit hard. My works brings a lot of ideas together. I tried to first start by explaining the ramifications of my work being successful, i.e., software quality improves. This motivates the problem. Then, I went a bit more in depth explaining how I go about doing this in general. Finally, I detailed my individuals works and explained some of the nuances between them so I wasn’t seen as a one-trick pony.

A lot of these schools also wanted to know how I would support undergraduate research. My advisor and I saw this coming, so I was able to take a few opportunities to help supervise undergraduate research. I was able to detail what I learned from this experience and how I would apply it in future projects. I also laid out a few ways my current line of research could give opportunities to undergraduates with varying degrees of interest in research.

The last section of the statement dealt with future work. This was the section I felt most shaky about. During the Ph.D., you can get very focused on your dissertation work. I struggle with a long term research plan. Most of my ideas are about the next 1 or 2 projects, not the next 5 projects where each one build off of the prior. I need to work on building long-term visions when I start worrying about getting external funding. The future work section has more emphasis in R1 programs to my knowledge.

Teaching Statement

The teaching statement is a place to talk about your teaching philosophy and show how you would/did put it into practice. I went out of my way to get teaching experience as a primary instructor. This slowed down my research a bit the last two semesters, but it was without a doubt worth it. I have become extremely comfortable speaking in front of a class of students. This is great preparation as all professors will have to get up and teach a class. Also, if you want a job at a PUI, you will likely have to give a teaching demo. I think this helped me a lot, as getting up in front of a new group of students did not faze me at all.

Since I had experience, I could easily point to triumphs and moments I learned to improve my teaching. Putting my philosophy into words was a bit hard, but after some effort, I was able to boil it down to three concepts. See the teaching statement for an idea of what I mean.

Many schools also wanted an idea of what courses I could teach. I listed four general areas I am comfortable with and then listed which courses in their curriculum matched these areas. This is a little thing that shows you put in the effort to see what courses they offer and how you could help the department. They often ask for a course you would want to develop at the school as well.

The research and teaching statements took about 3-4 days each to come together. It wasn’t 3-4 days of constant effort, but I needed the time for my brain to figure them out. The teaching statement really came together in my head when I was driving. I find you need to put in the hours, potentially not making progress, so your subconscious can figure it out for you later. This has been true for me in both research and writing. I probably scraped my draft for each 2-3 times. It can be helpful to just go “this ain’t working” and delete everything.

Applying

There are a lot of schools that fall into the PUI category. Not nearly as many as the other categories of schools, but there are a lot. I wanted to apply to schools I would seriously consider working at. Limiting your search can be a bit risky, which I started to feel towards the end. However, if you do land a position, you will hopefully be happy. I looked at a few geographic locations (listed in order of preference): the Twin Cities, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts. I had good friends in the first two, and the latter has many great PUIs. I ended up applying to 7 schools in these areas and 1 school not in these areas.

Applying is tedious. It’s not hard once you have your materials together, but it is time consuming. The first few applications took about 1-2 hours to put together. By the end, it took about 30 minutes. You need to tailor the cover letter to each school, adjust the teaching statement to talk about which classes you could teach, and a few schools would ask for something others hadn’t. Some schools even asked for my undergraduate transcript. I figured out how to get it, but by the time I was going to start the process, I decided I didn’t really want to work at that school. Are these two things related? I’d like to say no, but I was on the edge about applying and that tipped me to the “no” side.

Offsite Interview

Interviewing for schools involves a preliminary offsite interview, over Zoom generally, and then an onsite interview (if they like you). I applied to 8 schools total and got 4 offsite interviews. Each of them were about 30 minutes. I was interviewed by somewhere between 2 to 5 faculty members. Some interviews also had undergraduate students there to ask questions. Generally, I was asked why I applied to school X, what do I think about teaching at a PUI, how could I engage undergraduates in research, and how I can add to the department’s commitment to DEI. Basically, for each piece of material you prepare, be ready for a question. After the questions, they would give me the remaining time (usually about 10 minutes) to ask my own questions. I usually asked about the state of their computation resources, as I need GPU compute power, how they help support undergraduate research, and another question specific to something that came up in the interview. At the end, they would give me an idea for their timeline.

Onsite Interview

Once the school has finished their offsite interviews, they will invite a few finalists to come visit their school. This is both an opportunity for you to impress them so they’ll give you an offer and a chance for them to wow you to come work at their school. From my 4 offsite interviews, I received 1 onsite interview (St. Olaf College). I will say, I withdrew from consideration shortly after this as I accepted a position at St. Olaf shortly after. Maybe one more onsite interview would’ve came my way, but who knows.

For the onsite interview, the department will fly you out and put you up in a hotel for 1.5-2 days of interviews and talks. This is both exciting and tiring. The interviews were typically not like normal interviews. Each was about 30 minutes. The faculty member(s) would ask a few questions about teaching and/or research and then they would give me time to ask my questions. You will likely get repeat questions. They try to mitigate against this, but people are going to be curious about similar things, so they’ll ask. I had probably 16 one-on-one or two-on-one interviews over two days. I suggest you drink plenty of water and bring chapstick.

I was told to prepare both a 40-minute research talk and a 40-minute teaching talk. The research talk is pretty standard. I’ve sat in on many during my time at UVA. Typically, you provide the audience a general idea of what problem you are solving in your dissertation. Then you go in depth on one or two of the works you’ve done in your Ph.D. Finally, you touch on potential future work. You want this to be approachable for everyone in the room. Since I was talking to a Math, Stats, and CS department, I gave an overview of some topics I wasn’t sure they would be familiar with. Even if you are talking to a CS department, you want everyone from the HCI people to theory people to the architecture people to understand and be interested in your talk. That being said, you also want to show them you are an expert. I was explicitly told “Try and make the talk approachable for the entire department, but you can spend about 10 minutes in the weeds of your work where you might lose some people”.

The teaching talk varies from place to place. At Drake, I had a future faculty member give a lecture in my data structures course. This seems quite nerve-racking as you are literally stepping in for a professor. I’m sure they gave him plenty of heads up about whats been covered and what to talk about, but it still seems pretty tricky. I think the upside is, if the person nails it, you can be very confident in their abilities. For my teaching talk, I was told I could teach about whatever topic in CS I found interesting. I ended up giving a talk about “Delta Debugging”, as its approachable for people with very little CS experience (some of which were in the audience), and it relates to my subfield of CS (Software Engineering). I know my experience teaching at UVA prepared me for this. There were a couple curve balls that were thrown my way during the talk, and I believe I handled them well.

During the interview, they will also typically schedule lunch with students and a dinner with faculty. These are a bit more casual, but of course you feel like your still on. St. Olaf also scheduled a lunch with two faculty members outside of the department and I was told this was explicitly “off the record”. This was a nice time to get to ask whatever questions I wanted and a moment to relax. At the end of the last day, I met with the department head and got an idea for the timeline moving forward.

Waiting for an Offer

This was the worst part. I already have a anxious brain, and waiting to hear back on something like this only amplifies it. I started thinking “Should I have applied to more schools”, “Should I start preparing my materials to apply for an R1?”, “What could I have done better?”. The reality is, things move slow at colleges. First, you need to wait for all of the onsite interviews to finish. I understand this isn’t always the case at R1s, but it seems to be so at PUIs since they generally have less open positions and they invite fewer candidates. I believe Virginia interviewed ~50 candidates over several months for 7 position. From my understanding, most PUIs that are hiring have 1 position available (sometimes 2) and they’ll host 3-4 candidates for onsite interviews. Once the interviews are done, the department needs to come to a consensus on who to hire. Then, they need approval from various people (dean, provost, etc.). Finally, they can offer the position. With this in mind, it all happened pretty quickly. I received the verbal offer a week after my visit and officially signed on a few days later. But during the waiting, I was tied up in knots.

Getting an Offer

If waiting is the worst part, this is undoubtedly the best part. I was at first expecting an email. Then I read online to expect a call. Then I read to expect an email setting up a call. Basically, it will vary depending on the school, but I received a call. The initial call will likely be someone from the department letting you know you got the gig. You likely won’t have to do any negotiations, and they likely won’t have any power to promise you anything. In my call, we set up a future call with the person who would lay out the offer in detail and who would be able to negotiate. So, for this first call, just express your excitement (hopefully you are excited), thank them, and find out what is going to happen next.

I had a phone call a few days later with the associate dean of the college the MSCS department is in. They laid out the offer, asked if I had any questions, and we negotiated a bit. I honestly didn’t have much to negotiate. It was a pretty fair offer. We went back and forth the next day or so and came to an agreement I think we were both happy with. Honestly, this process went very smoothly and made me feel even more excited about the school. They worked with me to get a good package that I think will allow me to be successful as both a teacher and a researcher. I think what really helped is I did my homework. I knew what kind of equipment I would need, how much it would cost, and where I could compromise. The associate dean was committed to helping me be successful and I felt very much like we were working together.

Overview

As always, everyone’s experience will differ. I think this is a pretty fair overview of what to expect for a PUI job search. If you have multiple offers, you may be able to use them as leverage, but its my understanding that many of these schools don’t have much wiggle room on salary. You might be able to get more in terms of the “one time costs” like moving expenses, start-up, etc. The job search is exhausting. I was teaching a class, working on a research paper, preparing my dissertation proposal, and doing job search things all at the same time. It was unfortunate timing, but it is what it is. I relied heavily on external resources, like this guide and the ones listed on the PUI website. Hopefully this helps someone. Feel free to reach out if you have questions.